I'm in the process of switching over my home network server, a PM 7500 (upgraded to 604), from YDL to Gentoo. I have two ethernet ports: eth0 is the built-in port, which connects to a cable modem, and eth1 is a Farallon 10/100 card (using the 8139too driver), which connects to the LAN. At this point I have Gentoo completely installed on one hard drive, and a crippled YDL remaining on the other until I have Gentoo fully working.

When I booted into Gentoo for the first time (using a 2.6.5-gentoo-r1 kernel), eth0 worked just fine using DHCP as I specified in /etc/conf.d/net. eth1, of course, was a different story until I found out that I had neglected to compile 8139too support into the kernel. So I did that, added an alias to the driver in /etc/modules.conf, and rebooted. At this point, eth1 is working, taking the IP address and other information that I had assigned to it. However, I was puzzled to find that eth0 now refuses to work!

At startup, the computer now hangs for several minutes while attempting to bring up eth0, and then reports that it failed to do so. Subsequent attempts to start /etc/init.d/net.eth0 produce the same result. ifconfig shows that indeed eth0 has not been assigned an IP address. How can this be the case when it was working while eth1 did not? Both ethernet ports work just fine when I reboot into YDL (kernel 2.4.20-8d or something to that effect). I'm fairly certain that I didn't do anything to break eth0 in configuration files or kernel options.

best bet would be to try and assign manual address to both, and also to verify they are coming up in the order you suspect they are .. I've had experiences where they re-order themselves, especiall when going from 2.4 -> 2.6

best bet would be to try and assign manual address to both, and also to verify they are coming up in the order you suspect they are .. I've had experiences where they re-order themselves, especiall when going from 2.4 -> 2.6

Wow, you got it exactly right! A combination of changing around the interfaces and restarting my cable modem got it to work. Thanks so much.